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Tag Archives: Designing Custom Hoodies

Customizing your hoodie for the first time, but don’t know exactly how to go about it? Or are you thinking of designing hoodies for profit, and would like to know how the pros do it? Whatever your goal may be today, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to be sharing the secrets of expert shirt designers today to help bring everyone’s game up in designing custom hoodies.

Be fearless

This may come as surprise to many folks, but shirt design is serious business, especially if you are thinking of make your own hoodie afterward. Wearing a custom hoodie is cool, but before you get to the “cool” part, the design has to be birthed first.

And trust us; the best designs on the market today took quite a bit of time before they exited the designer’s computer or drawing board. Sure, anyone can make a quick design by just taking images here and there. But for the genuine article, the truly good designs, you need to be fearless.

What does fearlessness have to do with design?

It all boils down to how you want to think of designing a hoodie. Being a unique is a virtue in the world hoodies and shirts, simply because so many other people are doing it. If you want to make a personal statement by making a special design, the same principle applies, too.

When you’re making a hoodie for a broad range of people, there’s always a chance that some people might not like what you’re offering. But there is an equal chance that they will, because people have differing tastes. The difference in tastes is your advantage as a budding designer.

Look at old concepts and messages and try to give them a new spin. Breathe new life into the old. Think of ways for people to see things in a new way, from a new perspective. Use a variety of techniques to get the projection that you want. The hoodie is a unique artistic canvas, definitely. If you can pull it off with the hoodie, you will be able to pull it off with other kinds of shirts, like sweatshirts, short sleeve shirts, and the like.

Wearability matters

Unless you or your target market are equally fearless, there are certain subtle boundaries as to what you can put as a shirt design and get away with. By ‘get away with,’ what we really mean is ‘that people would actually wear the hoodie with your design on it.’

The real challenge here obviously is to push the boundaries to make people think, and at the same time not cross the boundary so much that people would not want to wear the hoodie that you designed. Sure, you can design with plain images, but who wants to wear plain things nowadays? It’s the unique and special things that get the most attention. And a custom hoodie is right up there on the list of the most special garments for casual, daily wear.

Don’t forget to brand

When it comes to marketing yourself, branding is everything. Branding makes people remember your work, and recognize it from afar. The Hanes brand was always subtle with its branding and yet the capital H is now synonymous with Hanes garments.

That’s the kind of branding that you need: subtle but powerful. But then again, you still need to create a powerful or compelling portfolio of shirt designs that people love so they will be able to remember your talent and passion.

Apart from subtle branding, you can also make people recognize and remember your work by creating a unique style of designing hoodies and shirts. Consistency in your aesthetics is definitely important here. You can try a variety of strategies, but eventually, you’d have to settle for a particular array of approaches that make your designs identifiable.

Develop a deep relationship with color

How much do you know about color and how the different colors interact with one another? If you don’t know much yet, we recommend that you start learning more about the science of colors. With hoodie and shirt designs, it’s all about how you can manage color and how it projects. Drawing your design with a pen or pencil is one thing, but once you begin to add color to it and put it on a hoodie, you will see what we mean. Placing art on a canvas like a hoodie is different from putting it on a regular canvas. The design has to have that magic factor that makes it perfect as a shirt design.

Give yourself time to learn

Art isn’t something that you learn immediately, so it’s understandable that you will encounter serious challenges in the beginning. The great thing about challenges (at least in this field) is you will know exactly what you need to learn when you can’t do it. But luckily, there are a ton of resources on the Internet where you can learn about color theory, how to design using digital image editors like Photoshop, and the like.

Innovating comes when you’ve learned enough about the box to get out of it. Learn the contours of the box first. We hear it all the time from new designers: they want to break the chains, they want to get out of the box. But you can’t get out of the box if you don’t even know what it looks like, first. Sure, breaking the norms is almost always cool, but with art, it’s both talent and skill. You need to fill in both sides to be an effective hoodie designer.

Learn the art of combining

A shirt design doesn’t always have to be one image and one line of text. Try to find out if you can make your design work by combining different elements. And don’t forget to place the image on a hoodie (digitally) to see what it looks like!